As the new system became less of an experiment by one school and more of a community effort, there were discussions both about how best to coordinate the work of the project and where it might fit with the current Sakai CLE. As the system developed, it became clear that what was being developed was not the next generation of a Collaboration and Learning Environment (or, for that matter, an LMS), but a new product category altogether. A new term was created: Open Academic Environment, or Sakai OAE. This term is inspired in part by an article written by Brigham Young University VP of Academic Technology in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, in which he called for the creation of an Open Learning Environment (OLN).
The OLN has three key features:
It is malleable
It leverages technologies that did not exist when the LMS was born in the late 1990s
It strikes a manageable balance between imperatives of institutional networks and the promise of the cloud
There are two important differences between Mott's...